Passionist Earth & Spirit Center

Passionist Earth & Spirit Center

The Passionist Earth & Spirit Center is a JPIC (Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation) organization initiated by the Passionist Community of Holy Cross Province and incorporated as a non-profit 501(c)3 organization in May 2010. While rooted in the Christian faith and the Passionist charism, its programs and resources are available to all.

Heritage

The Passionist Earth and Spirit Center has been inspired by the wisdom and vision of Thomas Berry, C.P, who pioneered the Great Work to which the Center is committed. His dream for the Earth guides the Center’s work: “the future can exist only when we understand the universe as composed of subjects to be communed with, not as objects to be exploited.”

Thomas Berry and the Great Work

The Passionist Earth & Spirit Center is devoted to the Great Work described by Thomas Berry as a commitment “to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”

Thomas Berry (1914-2009) was a Passionist priest, cultural historian, social critic, and one of the leading environmental thinkers of our time. He saw, before many others became aware, the critical nature of our present moment, with its looming ecological crisis. For more than 40 years he worked to develop a comprehensive vision of a viable future for the Earth community. From his academic beginning as a cultural historian, he evolved to become a historian of the Earth. He described himself as a “geologian.”

Berry was president of the American Teilhard Association and is indebted to the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for helping shape his own understanding of the universe story. For two decades, he directed the Riverdale Center of Religious Research along the Hudson River. During this period he taught at Fordham University where he chaired the history of religions program.

His major contributions to the discussion on the environment are in his books: The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 1988 reprinted, 2006),\; The Great Work: Our Way into the Future(Random House, 1999); The Universe Story (coauthored with Brian Swimme, Harper San Francisco, 1992); Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (Sierra Club Books and University of California Press, 2006); The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (Orbis Books, 2009); and The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2009).

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Inspirational Quotes

This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric. Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. (49)

Pope Francis I

Ladauto Si

"How is it that sometimes subtly, sometimes with a sudden startle, God breaks through the thick fog of our collective blindness? Our lives confront us with the inevitable experience of our own suffering, the suffering we cause to others, the pain we experience in and with the suffering of others."

—Elaine M. Prevallet

"Don’t wait for some miracle to be performed on you from without, lifting you above your fears and doubts and self-centeredness. You help God from within by turning in outgoing love to others, and miraculously your fears and doubts and self-centeredness will vanish. The miracle starts within, not from without."